Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is generally acknowledged to be the greatest draftsman of the twentieth century. The Frick Collection, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., co-organized an exhibition that looked at the dazzling development of Picasso's drawings, from the precocious academic exercises of his youth in the 1890s to the virtuoso classical works of the early 1920s.

France has long been fascinated by the Ottoman Empire, and for hundreds of years the taste for turquerie was evident in French fashion, literature, theater and opera, painting, architecture, and interior decoration. Turquerie, a term that came into use in the early nineteenth century, referred to essentially anything produced in the West that evoked or imitated Turkish culture.

One of the most familiar and beloved paintings at The Frick Collection, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert (c. 1480), is also deeply enigmatic. The artist has imagined this medieval saint alone in a stony wilderness, stepping forward from his simple shelter into a golden light that seems to transfigure him spiritually. For centuries, viewers of this masterpiece have puzzled over the meaning of Bellini’s composition and have sought explanations in a variety of pictorial and textual sources.

When Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) was asked whose talents he would most like to possess, he declared: "Rembrandt's." And as the largest individual railway stockholder in the world, Frick is reported to have said that "railways are the Rembrandts of investment." Like Frick, the Dutch art historian Frederik Johannes Lugt (1884–1970) was a great admirer and collector of works by the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669); as a teenager he wrote a biography of the artist, illustrated with his own copies after Rembrandt's most famous works.

Painted at the height of Velázquez's career, the Frick's King Philip IV of Spain (1644) is one of the artist's consummate achievements. Contemporary chronicles as well as bills and invoices in Spanish archives indicate that it was painted in a makeshift studio only a few miles from the frontlines of a battle, and that it was completed in just three sittings. The work, which shows its subject dressed in military costume, an atypical depiction, was sent to Madrid where it was used during a victory celebration.

The greatest Spanish draftsmen from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century — Ribera, Murillo, and Goya, among them — created works of dazzling idiosyncrasy. These diverse drawings, which may be broadly characterized as possessing a specifically "Spanish manner," will be the subject of an exclusive exhibition at The Frick Collection in the fall of 2010.